Treacherous Translators and Improvident Paupers: Perception and Practice in Dutch Makassar, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Translator/interpreters in (pre)colonial settings were gatekeepers, capable of shaping both perceptions and policy. Their ability to bridge cultural divides was crucial, but consequently their identities could appear ambiguous and their loyalties uncertain. This case-study analyses the changing character of official translators in the East Indonesian port of Makassar in the 18th and 19th centuries. It considers the fluctuating fortunes of the mestizo families who dominated the role under the VOC and until the mid 1800s. Subsequently the Dutch East Indian state was increasingly able to subordinate personal networks to professional administrative criteria, marginalizing the mestizo and consolidating the colonial bureaucracy.Les traducteurs-interprètes qui ont été employés dans un cadre précolonial et colonial peuvent être considérés comme des véritables gardiens à cause de leur habilité à traduire des perceptions et à formuler des stratégies. Leur capacité d’établir un rapprochement entre des mondes culturels divergents était crucial. Cependant, cette même aptitude leur valait des fois une réputation d’identité ambiguë et de loyauté douteuse. Cette contribution traite des traducteurs officiels du port de Makassar (l’Indonésie orientale) aux XVIIIe-XIXe siècles, et en détaille la transformation de leur statut social durant cette époque à travers l’analyse des fortunes instables des familles métisses qui exerçaient un rôle dominant sous la VOC jusqu’à la mi-XVIIIe siècle. Par la suite l’État colonial des Indes néerlandaise s’est montré de plus en plus capable de soumettre les réseaux personnel en les remplaçant par des critères relatifs à une administration professionnelle. Il s’ensuivit que les traducteurs métis furent marginalisés tandisque la bureaucratie coloniale fut renforcée.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".